


Doctor, Teacher, Midwife, Prof

by black_lodge



Series: the wonder that's keeping the stars apart [1]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-04
Updated: 2015-09-04
Packaged: 2018-04-19 01:33:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4727765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/black_lodge/pseuds/black_lodge
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post "The Robot of Sherwood." Clara sews the button back onto the Doctor's jacket and will not be rushed, thank you very much.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Doctor, Teacher, Midwife, Prof

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in  
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere  
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done  
by only me is your doing,my darling)  
                                                     i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want  
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)  
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant  
and whatever a sun will always sing is you 

here is the deepest secret nobody knows  
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud  
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows  
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)  
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart 

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

-e.e.cummings

 

***

“Who taught you to drive, anyway?” Her irritation is muffled by the needle clamped between white lips, which is probably not the safest place to stick a wicked-sharp bit of steel while you’re being bounced around in what she’d once called ‘the vomit comet.’

“By the best teacher available!” he cries, hanging onto a lever for dear life – “Me!”

 _For goodness’ sake,_ Clara groans internally, but for once she keeps her mouth shut, lips hard around the needle, as the TARDIS’ gyrations reach a fever pitch, practically deafening them with the howling and grinding of the materialization operation. It takes all her concentration to simply hang on, until at last, with a bone-shaking crunch that throws her out of her chair, the spinning suddenly ceases.

“All clear?” comes the Doctor’s voice from down below. After shakily taking the needle out of her mouth, Clara responds with a few choice words that, to her surprise, earn her a snort of laughter. “I’ll take your characteristic zest as a yes!”

Clara hates to admit he was right, and then wonders momentarily whether that means she’d prefer to be Not All Right At All, Thanks, just to prove her point. Well, that would be unimaginably petty, she thinks as she rubs her now-bruised knee; lucky that thought has never crossed her mind.

Now a hand is reaching down to her, grasping her by the forearm and hauling her upright with the kind of strength that reminds her, of all things, of a dance instructor she’d once had who made being led feel less like being dragged around the dance floor and more like flying over it. She’s on her feet in a snap, feeling like she actually had been airborne, at least for a moment.

“Well? Finished yet?” says the Doctor, grasping at his coat which is still draped over her arm. She snatches it out of his reach.

“Hardly!”

“Just forget it; we’ve got somewhere to be!” He starts to dash back down the stairs. “Time and tide wait on no man, Clara. Or seamstress.”

“If you’re gonna chide me with quaint clichés, you’d better stick strictly to the nautical,” she calls, folding herself into his own large armchair with an air of determined finality. “For a man with a time machine, you do like to make a girl wait. I’m just returning the courtesy.” She wielded her needle deftly, its silver flashing as she spoke. He’s halfway down the steps, eyebrows screwed up like a Picasso portrait, and she’s gotten good enough at reading alien eyebrow to understand he’s communicating _I haven’t the patience for this_ and a bit of _Jaysus, but you’re a right wee madam._ Or something to the effect.

“A man with a time machine is never late,” he says in plain English. “He arrives precisely when he means to.”

“Not late then. Just rude,” says Clara briskly.

“That is hardly an objective observation, now, is it,” the Doctor begins, supercilious in his rationality, but Clara’s death-glare -- the same one she gives Courtney during an episode of ‘disruptive influence’ during second-form Survey of English Literature – shuts him right up.

“In any case,” she says once she’s cowed all but his eyebrows into submission, “your second proposition inherently contradicts your first. A man with a time machine is never late – and yet time and tide wait on no man. Doctor, for shame.” She crosses one leg over the other.

The Doctor seems to realize there’s no way to talk her out of her decision to finish her job. And her cheeky self-confidence ignites something in him that his other companions never quite touched. It’s – perhaps – well, he doesn’t know what it is, but he’s genuinely peeved. He opens and closes his mouth as if he can’t find the right words, and when he does find them, they’re all wrong.

“Schoolteacher!”

Clara’s head shoots up. It sounds so belittling that it actually stings and for a moment she can feel the prickle of tears. The death-glare starts to narrow Clara’s eyes and she puts down her mending.

“I _am_ , thanks for noticing,” she says tightly. “And if you don’t mind your manners, Doctor, I will teach you a lesson you’ll never forget, two-thousand-year-old alien or no.”

The Doctor stares at her, open-mouthed. She holds his gaze for as long as he lets her, and then he shuts his mouth and blinks. His eyebrows are all but shouting _Warning! Warning! Warning!_

“I went to uni too, you know,” she says quietly as she returns to the task at hand. “I might not be able to call myself a _doctor_ ,” she tells him. “But I was top of my class. I could have gone on, if I’d wanted.” She finds the words are out of her control, and they race like an accelerating runaway train. “But I _chose_ not to. I _chose_ to be a schoolteacher. I knew there was no glory in it, or, heaven forbid, money. I knew my professors would look down on me, see it as a waste of my academic potential, because _they said as much_ to my face, but I didn’t care. Because they didn’t matter. I knew what I wanted.” She looks down into her lap again, suddenly too oversensitized to his stare and his shouty eyebrows to maintain eye contact. And what she wants to say – that he matters, that he means the world to her, more than the world, the _universe_ – it all sticks in her throat, and she doesn’t know how to articulate the feeling.

But she doesn’t have to, because in an instant he’s climbing up the steps, a measured pace after that flood of words, and he comes to stand in front of her. He murmurs her name, rolling the syllables around in his mouth, sharp Glaswegian rhotics and all.

“Dear Clara. _My_ Clara.”

She bring herself to look at him and he’s standing with his arms stiff at his sides, his hands clenched as if he’s afraid of what they might do if he lets them relax. He looks like he’s standing at the cliff’s edge, contemplating the vast emptiness before him. Like he’s not entirely sure how he ended up at this place, but there is no bitterness or ill will in his heart toward the one who brought him here.

“I knew what I wanted, too,” he says then, eyes vivid and unblinking.

Clara doesn’t know what to say. She’s pretty sure she’s not even capable of speech at the moment.

After a pause the Doctor clears his throat so harshly that she flinches. “I’m talking about _you_ , ye daft lass. I wouldn’t be traveling with a _schoolteacher_ if that weren’t exactly what I wanted.”

Clara’s certain her heart has never beat so hard, not when being chased by a Dalek’s antibody defense system, not when meeting Robin Hood face to face, not when she got a phone call from the old Doctor. Not even then. And she had never seen his face look so… well….

Then he blinked, and whatever it was in his eyes had retreated, pulled down the shades. He gestured expansively like a magician warming up his crowd. “Now would you stop doin’ that terrible _thing_ with your eyes before I do something rash? We have new planets to visit, stars to midwife!”

“To _midwife_?”

“There’s a pair of twin stars being born right this minute, Clara, and if we don’t get there in time, we’ll miss the christening!”

How quickly he leaps from that ledge and into action. Clara can’t help but be swept up in his wake.

But she’d rather be at his side. So, with a quick nip of her sharp teeth, she severs the thread and draws a good knot into it. “No Doctor would attend a christening in less than his Sunday best,” she says, and then she hops down to him and helps him into the neatly mended jacket.

“The stars won’t care, right –,” he begins, but she interrupts sharply.

“Oh, quit your chuntering on,” she says as she comes around to his front and inspected her handiwork. “There. Good as new, I’ll wager, and now we can go. No need to fuss.”

“Fussing? Who’s fussing? _I’m_ not fussing! Stop fussing at me, woman!”

Clara takes a step back, hands on her hips. “Q.E.D., Professor Doctor,” she says, not quite laughing, but almost splitting at the seams with it.

“Professor Doctor? That is not a thing, Clara. Clara, don’t you dare make that a thing.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it — Professor.” And she takes off for the TARDIS doors in a flash, faster than even he can respond, for the next great adventure.


End file.
